Mining the Election Data for Evidence of Good or Evil (Part 1 of 4)

I heartily agree with his criticisms of much of the main stream media:

The problem is that many media practitioners today are not intellectually prepared to deal with complex issues and are often too lazy to put in the work needed to prepare to deal with such issues. This is evident in the quality of our talk shows where the host is content to lob superficial "gimme" questions at a guest instead of engaging him/her in serious discussions that will illuminate difficult subjects or unmask hidden agendas.

Let me just add what most people already know that that self-same media needed no more intellectual preparation--corporately or individually--to receive the BILLIONS in election campaign spending, than to know NOT to bite the generous hands that feed it.

So let me turn to the second part of the article dealing with the LEGITIMACY of the recent polls, which utilized an Automated Election System based on portable Precinct Count Optical Scanners. I shall focus mainly on the technical critique and leave Comelec's allegedly irregular deviation from various elections laws and procedures for a later piece.

Perhaps because of those irregularities, long-running suspicions and accusations have once more arisen that the Smartmatic PCOS system is hackable from within, and vulnerable to all sorts of digital legerdemain that could be used for wholesale, computerized cheating. Indeed, since the election data has become publicly available and online, many technically adept and even not-so-adept critics say there are obvious signs of such "hocus PCOS" in the election data itself.

Rene quotes two critics of the system and their observations, as follows:

As first pointed out by political activist Ado Paglinawan, the way the 2013 election results came in was "highly suspicious." He correctly observed that, "from the smallest count to the biggest count, there is consistency in the space between the first 15 senatorial candidates…. The progression through the night is mathematically predictable, and is a statistical improbability." The nationwide trend observed by Mr. Paglinawan in the senatorial tally indicated to him that the count "was following a pre-programmed formula based on earlier pre-paid surveys, rather than the actual vote." It was clear to him, he wrote, "that an earlier decision of ranking had been predetermined and the proportion of votes had been pre-designated from a national perspective, with a total disregard for provincial and regional nuances…. From 10% of the vote to 60%, the tally has been running a consistent vote share. As the votes from different provinces came in, the voting pattern was identical for the senatorial positions, something contrary to historical experience in Philippine politics."

Former Comelec IT director Ernie del Rosario adds: "The progressive tallies follow some sort of deterministic linear equation devoid of the influence of any probabilistic parameter or variable. This can only mean one thing -- it is a pre-designed results reporting mechanism that fits the 9-3 survey instead of a tally of the actual votes. I will call it the 9-3 Formula. Notice that the rankings of the candidates in the entire tally (1st to 33rd place) from the time the first report was published to subsequent ones are practically unchanged. What happened to the individual candidates’ known bailiwicks that should have caused some ranking movements in the tallied results? Smoothened by the 9-3 linear formula?" Mr. del Rosario then wryly remarks, "Magdadaya rin lang ang mga ito, medyo sana lagyan nila ng konting pag-iisip [These guys who planned to cheat should have maybe put a little more thought into it]."

Throughout the week since the election, I've been engaged with many others on Twitter and Facebook discussing and debating these very points. So I decided to look at all the data myself and decide for myself about these accusations, without any prejudices or pre-conceived notions. Luckily the data both gentlemen quoted by Rene above is contained in one compact package maintained by the superb team at Rapplerdotcom headed by Ms. Maria Ressa. The Official Tally of Votes of the 2013 Elections

A table at the above location contains the individual votes of the 33 Senatorial candidates who vied for the 12 available seats in each of 16 Canvassing Stages conducted by the Comelec last week and which resulted in the proclamation by last Friday night (in 3 separate, widely-criticized partial proclamations) of the Magic 12 winners.

It is this data that both Mr. Ado Paglinawan and Ernie del Rosario are referring to. In what follows I shall endeavour to present the actual data in a form that will allow readers of Philippine Commentary to participate with me in a thoroughgoing examination and critique of the accusations.

In this post I shall do not much more than present the information before sharing my own conclusions about them.

First to this statement from Mr. Paglinawan quoted above:

"from the smallest count to the biggest count, there is consistency in the space between the first 15 senatorial candidates….

In the graph below, which I prepared using a spreadsheet program and the data in the Official Tally, readers will see a series of 33 curves each with 16 data points. The X-axis of this graph represents the 16 tallies performed by the National Board of Canvassers on some 304 local and overseas "Certificates of Canvass" containing some 294 million votes for the 33 candidates cast by some more than 39 million voters who turned out for the election. The Y-axis shows the PERCENTAGE of the TOTAL VOTES ALREADY CANVASSED at each stage with which each of the 33 candidates were credited.

Please examine this graphic carefully and consider the statement above of Mr. Paglinawan in the clear light of this simple plot. The 'smallest count' he speaks of is Canvas #1 and the 'biggest count' is Canvas #16 at which point some 294 million votes had been counted.

The tabulated data is prettier found at the Rappler website, but is also here as a simple listing:

COMMENT LINES ARE OPEN and I shall reserve my own for that venue. I shall continue an examination of the other allegations quoted by Rene Azurin later tonight or tomorrow. THANKS for slogging through this if you have gotten this far.

2 comments:

I took great pains to produce a graphic that people can zoom in on to see the real detail in the data. It's pretty clear that on an individual basis, the percentage of the total votes garnered by each candidate at each stage of the canvas--whether they lost or not--was NOT CONSTANT. I shall present my analysis of each of the other allegations in the next three parts of this study.